Award-winning Author to Speak in Rexburg

Award-winning Author to Speak in Rexburg

Award-winning Author Carla Kelly to Speak at the Madison Library District

Award-winning author Carla Kelly will speak at 7:00 PM on Friday, October 20, in the Madison Library District’s Community Room which is located at 73 N. Center St. in Rexburg.

Carla, a veteran of the New York and international publishing world, is best known for her Regency Romances, historical novels rich with manners and wit. She focuses on stories of “normal people” many of them hard-working member of the Royal Navy and Marines. Kelly’s interest in the Regency Era is fueled largely by her scholarly interest in the Napoleonic wars. The daughter of a naval officer, she credits her own upbringing with some of this interest. Carla’s other major historical interest is the U.S. Indian Wars.

She began her writing career with short stories about the people who live in army garrisons through the American West. She wrote these stories as a direct result of working as a ranger in the National Park Service at Fort Laramie National Historic site. She has gone back a century further to write a series about a brand inspector and his wife in 18th century New Mexico. Other novels set in the West are forthcoming along with more Regencies.

Recently, Carla has been writing novels exploring her Mormon background, in particular the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each novel centers around historical events in the Mormon experience, from life on a Wyoming ranch, to Utah coal mines, to the Mormon exodus from Mexico.

Kelly has done some non-fiction work, too, editing the fur trade journal of Swiss painter Rudolf F. Kurz, and writing a history of Fort Buford (North Dakota), the site of Sitting Bull’s 1881 surrender to U.S. Army forces; but historical fiction remains Carla’s first interest. In addition to her wry humor, she is noted for the accuracy of her historical research principally because she is a historian, and it matters that the details be correct.

Along with Carla’s presentation, Eryri will perform tunes featured in her novel My Loving Vigil Keeping. They will also play a short set of related Welsh music beginning at 6:40 prior to her presentation.

This library event is also an outreach activity for the Malad Welsh Festival and is free to the public. The Madison Library District is located at 73 N. Center St. in Rexburg. For more information regarding the library and its programs, visit their website at www.madisonlib.org or their Facebook page at www.facebook.com/Madisonlib.org/ or give them a call at 208-356-3461 during business hours which are M-TH 9-8, F 10-6, and ST 10-4.

A little side-note for library folk on the eastern side of the state -

I'm pretty sure both Carla and Eryri would be happy to repeat this event in other libraries. Not saying she wouldn't be willing to go west or north, but there would be potentially costly travel involved.